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November 22, 2005

Parliament elects Merkel as German chancellor

by Sam Savage

BERLIN (Reuters) - Angela Merkel received broad backing in
a vote in parliament on Tuesday to become Germany's first woman
chancellor.

The conservative Merkel won 397 votes in the 614-seat
Bundestag lower house, the parliamentary speaker said, easily
securing the majority she needed to become Germany's eighth
post-war chancellor and the first to have grown up in the
former communist east.

She and her cross-party cabinet of conservatives and Social
Democrats (SPD) will be sworn in later on Tuesday, formally
taking over from the SPD-Greens government that Gerhard
Schroeder has led for the past seven years.